


Tale As Old As All This Island Bullshit. Or, why Danny feels his hatred of coconuts is justified.

by chaoticallyclev



Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Crack, Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-26
Updated: 2011-02-26
Packaged: 2017-10-15 23:33:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaoticallyclev/pseuds/chaoticallyclev
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Danny knows all the fairytales; he just never thought any of them were, you know, <i>real.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Tale As Old As All This Island Bullshit. Or, why Danny feels his hatred of coconuts is justified.

Danny’s never been one to deny his little girl anything, so Grace has a stack of fairy tale books taller than she is, and he’s read all of them multiple times. He knows about the magic slippers and the poison apples and, the fairy tale fix-all, True Love’s kiss.

Trust him, all of that is pretty much burned into his brain. And if you really wanted to know his opinion, he blames shitty parenting for any of that ever happening, but that’s beside the point. Danny knows all the fairytales; he just never thought any of them were, you know, real.

He’s still not sure that he believes it, and that’s in the face of the smashed-open coconut leaking all over Steve’s kitchen floor, the gnarled finger shoved into Steve’s chest by the old woman who seems to have appeared out of thin air, and the promise of some sort of mystical sleeping fit until forever and a day or some other bullshit.

Steve hits the deck after that.

Well, he starts to, but his fall is halted halfway down and he fucking levitates to rest on the table, hands folded atop his stomach.

Then the old lady— _witch_ , Danny corrects himself, gotta be a witch—disappears in a puff of smoke. A goddamn actual puff of curling purple smoke, for chrissakes; Danny is not cut out for this shit.

The first thing he does is call Kono.

Okay, no that’s a lie. First, he checks Steve’s pulse—so, sue him, like he’s going to trust the word of some gnarled tree witch when it comes to his partner’s life, okay?— _then_ he calls Kono.

“Alright, okay, first of all, I just want it to be known that I am not the crazy one here, are we clear on that? I am the sensible sane one who upholds things like due process and doesn’t get old women popping up in my kitchen and magically whammying me into one hundred years long sleep, or whatever bullshit fairytale we’re after here. That shit doesn’t happen to me.” Danny runs his hand through his hair, tugging at loose strands and completely destroying the grip of the gel he’d combed in so carefully this morning. This morning. Way back when he thought today was going to be—well, not normal, but at least normal for them. This? This was in no way normal.

“Danny, what are you talking about? Is everything okay?”

“No, nope, everything is not okay. Our resident crazyass SEAL pissed of the magical powers that be and apparently reside in fucking mystical palm trees in the middle of nowhere—and let me tell you, pissing off those particular powers leads nothing good. It leads to old women popping out of coconuts and said crazyass SEAL taking a nap on the kitchen table after some handwaving shit. And then the smoke! Purple, curling smoke. This doesn’t happen outside of Disney movies, Kono, it just doesn’t!”

“Okay, Danny, just—try to calm down. Chin and I will be there soon.” Kono’s tone is filled with more than a little disbelief underneath all the heavy sounds of worry. She probably thinks he’s fucking lost. Hell, maybe he _has_.

Danny sinks down onto one of the kitchen chairs and glares at Steve’s snoring form. “I blame you for all of this, just so we’re clear.”

Steve snores louder, probably just to spite Danny, the jerk.

~*~

The fact that the first words out of Kono’s mouth upon entering the house were, “Oh, fuck, you weren’t kidding!” doesn’t exactly lift Danny’s spirits.

Chin’s already crouching down next to the coconut pieces and examining them. Danny notes distantly that they are fucking _glowing_ now, and he had no idea how me missed that, but whatever. It all seems pretty par for the course now.

“No, I was not fucking kidding.” Danny grumbles, tugging at his hair again.

Kono gives a quick shrug, apologetic with a hint of _‘can you blame me?’_ woven in.

“So,” Chin begins, “what exactly happened?”

Danny sighs heavily. “I don’t even know, honestly. It’s all smoke and pointing and then our, uh, little princess over there was out for the count.”

“Steve was cursed?” Kono asks. “Why would someone do that?”

“And why did they show up in a coconut?” Chin raises his eyebrows questioningly.

“Yeah, yeah, it’s all very mysterious. The important thing here is that, we need to wake Sleeping Beauty over there up, and I am not crazy. Just tacking that on there.” Danny had been worried about that last point for a while, but now at least Chin and Kono have joined him on the afternoon express to crazy town, if nothing else.

Kono gnaws on her bottom lip. “Well, have you tried anything to wake him up?”

“Have I tri—” Danny breaks off into a laugh just this side of hysterical. “No, I didn’t try to wake him up. Of course I tried to wake him up! He’s been slapped, splashed, and forced to sit through as much Springsteen as I had on my phone blasting into his ear at full volume. And none of it did shit. So, I’m out of ideas here.”

Chin and Kono exchange looks over Danny’s head, but he ignores them in favor of tightening his grip on Steve’s hand, which he doesn’t remember taking in the first place, but whatever. Today is just like that, he decides. Steve just goes on sleeping, letting out the odd snore here and there.

~*~

Chin pulls open a search on his phone and started looking through myths and legends. And as much as Danny wanted to protest that this in no way counted as research, he found that it was the only thing that even made sense. That didn’t keep him from griping, “What, so we stick a pea under him, and if he feels it, than he turns back into a real boy?”

Kono blinks and shakes her head. “That’s—never mind. Let’s stick to things more closely related to our problem, first, okay?”

“Alright, sleeping curses. What do we do for those?” Danny claps his hands together, and can’t believe the words coming out of his mouth.

Chin shrugs. “Well, I would say it sounds like we’re dealing with an island spirit, but I don’t know any legends that fit this description. And there is nothing about appearing out of coconuts. The only thing I could think of would be the work of _Kupua_.”

“Great, and what does that tell us?” Danny asks.

The slump of Chin’s shoulder doesn’t look promising. “Sorry, brah, I don’t think we’re going to find anything helpful through this.”

Danny makes a frustrated sound and tries to think of something, anything that could fix this mess. A hand comes to rest on his shoulder.

“Maybe he’ll wake up on his own,” Kono suggests, trying to smile reassuringly.

Danny responds with a hollow, “Maybe.”

  
They move Steve into his bedroom, partly because it’s more comfortably and a little bit because Danny isn’t sure how long that poor table could hold up under Steve’s gargantuan frame.

Chin and Kono head out for the night, making him promise to call if the situation changes, and also to get some sleep because he looks like shit. There are few things Danny would love more right now than to get some sleep, but yeah. He’s pretty sure that isn’t happening tonight. In fact, he’s pretty sure he’s going to be up all night watching every fairy tale movie he can pull up on this stupid phone with the internet and that Tube website. WeTube or something.

By the time morning comes and Chin and Kono return, Danny had passed out in a chair by Steve’s bed, his phone forgotten on the phone.

Danny startles awake as the alarm on Steve’s phone goes off. Steve doesn’t so much as stir. That’s when yesterday’s events sink back in and Danny contemplates going back to sleep to see if this time he’d wake up from this bizarre dream.

Kono slips into the room, carrying a cup of coffee she hands to Danny and he accepts with a small smile. “Still snoring away, huh?”

“Yeah, like a freighter.” Danny shakes his head.

Chin comes in a few minutes later, with a bunch of malasadas and ensemadas from Liliha Bakery. Honestly, Danny has never loved them more, even if this reeks like some sort of diversion tactic. He doesn’t even know. Sleeping next to his cursed partner is probably making him paranoid.

~*~

The problem is that it’s been three days, Steve’s still doing a spot-on impersonation of Sleeping Beauty, Danny’s pretty much moved into his place, and nothing is working. No, really. Attempts to break the curse to date:

1\. The previously mentioned slapping, shaking, and Springsteen-blaring wake-up call.

2\. A collection of good luck charms, ranging from rabbit’s feet to a penny Danny found outside.

3\. Dunking Steve in the ocean outside at dusk, attributed to the first site Kono found when searching “ways to break curses”

4\. A goddamn pea stuffed under Steve’s mattress. Turns out, he’s not a real princess seeing as he’s still napping like a baby after bottle time.

5\. Continual burning of incense. The bright side is that, Steve’s place smells less like dust and fresh spackle.

6\. Danny will deny this one if ever asked, but, in a fit of desperation on the second night, he did try putting every pair of shoes Steve owned on his feet.

Pretty much at this point, Danny was thinking of calling up one of them Potter actor kids or whoever and seeing if any of them were actually wizards, because well, crazier things had already happened.

Anyway, the problem was that Danny had Grace this afternoon, and Rachel and Stan were taking a weekend trip, so it wasn’t really negotiable. Not that Danny ever minded spending time with his little girl, it was just—he didn’t know how to explain Sleeping Steve to her. Because, yeah, he read her fairy tales and all that, but that was with the expectation that she would grow to accept that magic wasn’t real someday. Far in the future. Kids have to be able to believe in things like magic when they were little, that was just how the world worked. He wasn’t going to go around messing with that by making it scary and real.

He still doesn’t want to leave Steve for the whole weekend, which he knows doesn’t make much sense. It’s not like Danny’s really been accomplishing anything hanging around like this. Kono’s already offered to take over, at least for the weekend. He can—he could take her up on it, just for the day. Then maybe he could bring Grace over on Sunday for some time at the beach, tell her that Steve had to go do something at the office. It could work.

Danny tries not to read too much into the relief in Kono’s face when he agrees to go home. Grace was getting dropped off in a few hours, and Danny hadn’t been to his apartment for days.

~*~

  
Danny hardly sleeps at all that night, despite the bone-deep exhaustion he feels and the comfort of getting to sleep vertically on a surface that wasn’t primarily intended for sitting. It just seems too quiet. Even with the sounds of Grace talking in her sleep intermittently, it just isn’t quite right. He can’t pinpoint the problem, though, so he kept tossing and turning until morning.

Grace stumbles out of bed at around ten o’clock.

Sometimes Danny swears she’s already turning into a teenager or something because just a couple of years back, she would have been up by six and ready to watch cartoons with him.

Danny makes pancakes while Grace plans out their day. Roller-skating is apparently the theme of the week, and Danny is already planning how he can get out of this one without a bruised tailbone among other things. He calls Kono when Grace is ordering their shaved ice in the park: no change.

~*~

Saturday night is just as restless for Danny, though this time there is a few bruises added to the mix. Things strapped to your feet and coordination is just not a balanced equation. One does not equal the other. This is why he makes Grace wear a helmet, elbow pads, and knee pads, no matter how many times she gives him the puppy dog eyes.

He thinks about calling Kono again, but after the fifth call when Grace was brushing her teeth, Kono made Danny promise that he wouldn’t call again unless the witch showed up. She sounded more than a little annoyed when she said it, too, but Danny couldn’t help it. He’d gotten used to checking up on Steve throughout the day. He’d even gotten used to his stupid snoring, after a while.

Needless to say, Danny was glad when Sunday morning rolled around and he got to go back ho— to Steve’s place. Grace was just as excited about swimming; Danny swears living in Hawaii has made her half fish.

Danny manages to lure Grace back out of the water and into the house with promise of lunch around half past one. Of course, she sneaks into Steve’s room when she was supposed to be putting on dry clothes. Danny finds her sitting with Kono at the foot of Steve’s bed.

“Grace, monkey, what are you doing in here? Lunch is on the table, come on.” Danny places a hand on her back to guide her out of the room.

“Is he ever going to wake up, Danno?” She asks, eyes wide. He wants to reassure her that, yes, absolutely Steve will wake up. He is Super SEAL after all; he’s not going to be defeated by a little napping-curse. But Danny’s been wondering the same thing lately.

He bites the inside of his lip before answering. “I don’t know. I hope so.”

“Well, if he’s cursed, you can break that, right? They always break it in the movies!”

“We’re trying, babe. We’re trying so hard.” Danny crouches down next to her and cupping her face. “Okay? Good. Now, come on, your grilled cheese is getting cold, and I know you hate it when the cheese gets all crusty.”

Grace asks him about how they’ve been trying to break the curse in between mouthfuls of grilled cheese. Danny dutifully tells her the list in his head, and he doesn’t even leave out the thing with the shoes. Grace takes a large gulp of her juice and then fixes Danny with her most serious look. “But Danno, you guys didn’t try the kissing thing!”

Danny’s pretty sure his eyebrows just became a permanent part of his hair, they migrated up there so quickly.

“The kissing thing?” he repeats slowly.

Grace nods. “Yeah, like in Snow White and Sleeping Beauty and Enchanted and the Princess and the Frog, and even Shrek.”

And in less than five minutes, his daughter had come up with a plan that had more resources backing it than anything they had turned up in the past few days. When Kono walks in and gets a glass of water, Grace repeats her solution.

“What could it hurt?” Kono shrugs. Grace is beaming brighter than anything, and Danny’s just wondering how far Catherine is from shore this time. As he’s speculating this, Grace takes Kono’s hand and practically drags her up the stairs again, shouting for Danny to follow them.

Okay, so they’re doing this now.

When they reach Steve’s room, Grace points Kono towards the bed and explains, “In the Princess and the Frog, the princess broke it, so you could do it, I think.”

Kono laughs for a second, but leans down a presses brief kiss to Steve’s lips. Danny knows this is ridiculous, he wants to say how ridiculous this is, but for a second there, he holds his breath—but nothing happens.

“Sorry, Grace. Guess I’m not a princess.” Kono gives her an apologetic smile.

“It’s okay, you tried your best.” Grace sighs, shoulders slumping.

“Well, maybe it takes some time to really get to working. Come on, why don’t we go swim some more while we wait for this magic stuff to kick in, huh?”

Grace is reluctant to go, which is a first, her being less than enthusiastic about splashing around in the ocean. But she gets back into it, and the next thing Danny knows, Rachel’s showing up to collect Grace. Danny sends Kono home shortly after that; she’s already sacrificed most her weekend to this, she might as well get to have some fun tonight. Not that they are probably going to work in the morning, since the team is sort of on leave due to Steve’s sudden outbreak of the chicken pox.

He settles into the chair next to Steve’s bed— seriously, he’s pretty sure this thing is going to have a permanent imprint of his butt when this all done with—and watches Steve’s chest steadily rise and fall.

“So, it’s just you and me again,” Danny pauses, catching himself staring at the slight curve of Steve’s lips, lax in sleep.

Grace’s suggestion pops back into his head. He quickly shakes it away. “No, that’s—ridiculous. Well, not anymore ridiculous than a lady popping out of a coconut, but still. Ridiculous. If it didn’t work for Kono, it sure as hell isn’t going to work for me, right?”

Steve just keeps on snoring. Danny wishes it was less of a comforting sound.

“And what am I doing asking you for, huh? What, you’re going to just answer me now, because you’ve been so talkative all week. Jeez, I’m still doing it.” Danny sighs, resting his head on his hands. He takes a few deeps breaths before standing up and squaring his shoulders.

“Not like you’ll notice, right?” he says, voice coming out as a harsh whisper. Carefully, he strokes his fingertips down Steve’s sleep-smoothed cheek. “I can’t believe I’m doing this.”

He leans over and brushes his lips over Steve’s slowly, just for a few seconds, then pulls back.

His shoulders slump, mentally revising the list to add: _7\. Kissing a) by Kono b) by Danny_. Then a small movement catches his attention. Steve’s eyelids—nah, that was just the usual. You know, REM stuff.

But then it happens again, this time accompanied by a quiet groan.

“Steve?” Danny asks quietly, hardly—no, not even believing this is happening yet.

Steve scrunches up his nose, slowly bringing an arm up to rub at his eyes. “Danny, what is—”

For the record, Danny did not, for all intents and purposes, launch himself at Steve and hug the stuffing out of him. Off the record, that is exactly what he did, all while muttering “Thank fuck. Just— _Steve_. Do you see why coconuts are the root of evil now? What were you even thinking—but you’re okay now. You’re okay. Shit, never again, alright?”

Danny pulls back after a few more moments, only a little bit, though, as Steve’s arms seemed to have stubbornly latched around his midsection. Danny didn’t really have plans to go anywhere else, anyway. Steve’s got a dopey grin on his face.

“What?” Danny asks, defensively. Steve just shakes his head. “No, come on, don’t give me that. Tell me what’s got you grinning all goofy.”

“Just this,” Steve says, tugging Danny forward and pressing their mouths together. And, well, if this kiss goes on much longer than the first, Danny sure isn’t going to complain.

Later, when they do break apart and Danny’s hands limit themselves to rubbing soft circles against Steve’s back in their quest to reassure themselves that this is happening, Danny’s going to ask what the hell all of this has been about, and make Steve promise not to piss of ancient tree spirits ever again. Much later, when Danny finally settles down to sleeping, tucked up against Steve, Steve will call Chin and Kono to tell them he’s fine. But for right now, Danny’s just focused on this, fingers twisting in Steve’s t-shirt, knowing that this moment is all that matters.

  
And then, you know, they supposedly lived happily ever after.

THE END.

except for how I maybe have some scribbles where Govenor Jameson really is Steve's fairy godmother... >.>

**Author's Note:**

> For angelgazing's cliche meme. This is the cleaned up version of Sleeping Steve. yeah. I went there.


End file.
